“Ok, honestly, is this outfit too hipster?” Susanna Preziosi stands with her back to the narrow mirror, craning her head around to check out the rear view. She’s wearing bright red Adriano Goldschmied jeans, high boots, a long black top and a red beret. “I hate when people look like they’re trying too hard.” She turns and looks at the side view, and pulls the beret off her long chestnut hair. “Yeah, the beret was definitely too much I think.” She gives her head a satisfied shake and smiles at her reflection, not bothering to wait for a response.
She disappears into her small bedroom at the end of a short hallway in her tiny Hell’s Kitchen apartment. It’s 9 p.m. on Saturday night. It’s been a long week… very long, and she needs this night of total irresponsibility to shake it all off. It’s rare that she excited for a night out nowadays. She’s only 24 but most days she feels much, much older…. 40 or 50 or at least old enough to be worried about menopause and 401Ks rather than which bar to go to. But tonight that’s exactly what she’s concerned about. Well that and these pants, which look fantastic, but really might be too much. You have to be pretty confident to pull of skin tight bright red pants. Some liquid courage is definitely required.
She traipses back into the living room, which is really more of a living space/hallway/kitchen with a futon against one wall and a television an arm’s length away on the other wall. On either side of the TV are two narrow windows that look directly into the apartments across from them. The spectacles in the other apartments usually get more attention than the television. In one apartment a giant screen plays a constant loop of what appears to be gay porn, but from this angle (and with the giant close-ups of moving flesh) it’s difficult to tell. In another apartment, an overweight man in an ill-fitting pair of tighty whities paces back and forth furiously, pausing periodically to complete a labored set of calisthenics. In the dark his illuminated window highlights all the fine details of his zaftig form. It’s Susanna’s third year in this apartment now, having moved there directly after graduating at the top of her class from Middlebury College. While they once seemed strange and illicit to the girl who spent her first 18 years in a tiny town in New Jersey and the next four in a tiny town in Vermont, the bizarre window scenes barely register with her anymore, now serving mostly as an interesting conversation piece for visitors.
Her friend Erin, a television producer, sits on the futon sipping a Bloody Mary-esque mix of “Gordon’s” vodka and V8. It seems an odd and heavy choice for a pre-bar drink, but it’s all they had lying around. Susanna looks at it contemplatively for a moment and then gives a little shrug. “Erin, make me one of those?”
Erin begins mixing a drink for her, heavy on the vodka. She hands the drink over to Susanna and points to a tall stack of envelopes on the counter. “What are these?”
“Grad school.”
“Oh.”
Susanna doesn’t elaborate further. There are 14 applications total, all done and ready to be mailed. The hours of work it took to complete them are done, but it’s still a daunting pile. Of them, only three are addressed to New York zip codes; the rest are going all over the country.
Erin suddenly notices a drawing hanging up on the fridge and starts cracking up. “Oh my God, what is this??? What does that say? Massaging??” The drawing, done in crayons, shows three stick figures. The figure in the middle has a huge smile on his face and an arrow has been drawn designating “Me.” The two figures on the side have extraordinarily long, wavy arms that reach out to “Me” in the middle. Another arrow points to the arms and says “Masagin.”
Susanna sips her drink. “Carlos drew that. It was their assignment for Martin Luther King Day last year to illustrate their dream in life. His was two girls massaging him.” Erin is in hysterics. Susanna just smiles. Carlos is one of her students in the special education class at her school in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx, part of her other life, the one that makes her feel so old right now…the one she is escaping from tonight. She loves teaching—she’d been doing it for almost three years as part of the “Teach for America” program—but there’s one part of the job that’s more difficult than any other: getting away from it, and having the kind of fun a 24-year-old single woman in New York City deserves.
Arlene’s Grocery in the Lower East Side is packed wall to wall tonight. A long narrow bar greets the twentysomething patrons as they walk in. A small dance floor throbs with bodies grinding to a punched-up version of “99 Luftballons” by Nena.
Susanna loves this place. The energy in here is always off the charts, the hedonism almost palpable. She wastes no time sidling up to the bar, using an apologetic/flirtatious smile as a weapon to clear the way. Erin has gone off in search of their friends who are meeting them here, but Susanna is a woman on a mission tonight. She’s been single for awhile now and lately her life has been so burdened by work and exhaustion she hasn’t even had time for casual dates. She’s sick of feeling like a nun and the bar is absolutely laden with handsome potential.
She cozies up next to an attractive young man at the bar, decked out in the standard uniform of the LES indie-music-loving hipster: Grey hoodie, skinny black jeans and converse. He’s cute, she thinks. Just her type. She smiles up at him and he grins back.
“Hey!” He shouts over the music. “What are you drinking?”
“Vodka soda!”
“Hang on!” He leans over the bar. “Hey, can I get another Heineken and a vodka and soda!”
As they wait for their drinks, the only communication between them is a series of flirtatious smiles. Yes, she decides. He’s definitely, definitely cute. Well good, a drink and a guy. Two for one. That was easy.
At long last the bartender brings over the drinks. Hoodie pays and hands Susanna hers.
“What’s your name?!”
“Susanna!”
“Wait, come back here!”
Hoodie leads her to a calmer spot along the wall, looking out toward the dance floor. “So. Susanna huh? What brings you out here tonight?”
Small talk ensues. What is she doing there tonight? Meeting friends. Does he come here a lot? Yes he knows the bartender. Where does she live? Over in Hell’s Kitchen. She’d rather live down here or in Brooklyn, but it would have been an awful commute because she works up in the Bronx.
“The Bronx? What do you do?” He asks.
“I’m a teacher. What do you do?”
“Really? You don’t look like the teachers I had in school.”
“Yeah it’s… I don’t know. I do Teach for America. But what do you do?”
“I work for a video game company. So what grade do you teach?”
“They’re 6 and 7 years old but it’s special ed. What company do you work for?”
“No way, you teach special ed up in the Bronx? Man that must be a tough crowd.”
“They have their moments, but they’re really great kids. But anyway, it’s boring. Tell me about your job.”
“I’m sure it’s not boring.”
Hoodie is correct, she thinks. Her job is a lot of things and boring is not one of them. Stressful, exhausting, often unreal, and sometimes rewarding but not boring. When Alessandro had a rage attack and put his little fist through a thick glass window, it was not at all boring. When Marcos opted to find his own way home rather than take the school bus and she’d spent hours thinking he’d been kidnapped, that was not boring. And when Laquisha told her she was being molested by her stepfather, that was certainly not boring. Heartbreaking, scary, and panic-inducing moments all of them, but these were the things she had to think about constantly and she didn’t want these thoughts to find her here in this dark bar with this cute boy. The schoolteacher is staying home tonight. She is determined.
Bloc Party’s “Banquet” comes on and Susanna senses her out. “I love this song! Come dance with me.” Hoodie happily obliges.
The next six hours are spent in a blur of tequila shots, Irish car-bombs, and dancing the night away with her new Converse-clad beau. He lives in Brooklyn, likes the same music she does and has an interesting job. He seems almost too good to be true and she’s not quite sure if the booze acted as a social lubricant or as a blinding agent. Maybe there’s something gross about him that she’s missing, but right now she doesn’t care.
She doesn’t reconnect with Erin and the rest of her friends until almost 4 a.m., when the group stumbles out of the bar in search of pizza and French fries. The group begins to split according to neighborhood. Cabs are hailed. She’s been having an incredible time and isn’t ready for the night to end, because as soon as she gets in that cab it will no longer be Saturday night.
It will be Sunday, a day she dreads more than any other. The promise of a raging hangover and a stack of papers to grade looms in the distance.
On the plus side, she’s glad to still be hanging with her crowd. She feels like she’s an actual part of it this time, rather than hearing about it secondhand. Most of her friends are in comfortable media jobs or high-paying financial positions, and they do this at least two nights a week, but she hasn’t been out at this hour in months. There have been GREs to study for and grad school applications to do...parent-teacher conferences, papers to grade, lesson plans to make...not to mention her general state of exhaustion from waking up every morning at 5:20 a.m. and spending the day trying to corral and educate 12 young minds saddled with everything from A.D.H.D to autism, and everything in between. She knows this is not a life she is able to face with a hangover. The memory of her one attempt to do so, which resulted in expunging her guts of the previous night’s tequila shooters into a bag on the subway and falling asleep at her desk during her lunch break, serves as a constant reminder of that.
Erin has caught a cab back up to the West side so Susanna turns to Hoodie to say goodbye. He hesitates. “So…are you sure you don’t want to grab some food or have a nightcap somewhere or something?”
She does want to, actually. He is really cute, and it’s been such a fun and easy night...maybe she should just keep it going a little bit longer. Why not go have another drink, maybe make out a little? Other people do it all the time.
“I would like to but I’m just SO exhausted. I’d love to see that band you were talking about at Mercury Lounge next week though.” Since starting teaching, she gets intense cognitive dissonance about doing anything that’s even slightly against the rules. It’s a major pain in the ass.
He leans down and kisses her cheek. “Okay cool, they’re playing on Wednesday, so I’ll call you”.
She hasn’t been out on a Wednesday night since 2005, but she doesn’t tell him that.
“Sounds great,” she says.
Sunday brunch is something that Susanna both looks forward to and dreads every week. It’s almost as if the end of the meal signifies the end of any chance of free time for at least five incredibly long days. Some days she goes to brunch with her group of Teach for America friends and they compare notes on the inevitable chaos of their upcoming week. This is the only group that she really feels comfortable talking to about the details of her teaching day. They understand the complexities of her relationship with the kids and so she doesn’t worry so much that she’ll sound like she’s just “complaining about the little hoodlums up in the Bronx.”
Today however, she is meeting up with only one teaching friend, Katie, and they are joined by Erin and Erin’s roommate Caroline who writes for a magazine. They slide into a booth covered in an ugly floral print in a diner on West 52nd and Ninth. Susanna’s head is pounding and her stomach is churning but she can’t wait to fill her friends in on her evening.
“Sooooo?” Caroline eyes Susanna suggestively. “I heard you met a boyyyyyyy.”
Susanna grins. “Yeah, he was really cute. Nice. I gave him my number. Maybe he’ll call I don’t know. He was talking about seeing a show on Wednesday night but there’s no way I’m going to be able to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because this week is insane, and the show doesn’t even start until 11. I’ll never be able to get up and get everything done the next day.”
“I know, don’t you hate that?” Katie chimes in. “Seriously, it pisses my boyfriend off to no end that I won’t go anywhere on a week night. He just does not understand. He’ll be like, ‘I’ve been on a school schedule; I know what it’s like’. Um no honey, you really don’t. It’s so annoying.”
“Yeah well try telling that to a new guy,” Susanna shrugs. “I think he was really surprised that that’s even what I do.”
“Well you don’t exactly look like a schoolmarm do you? Your nose is pierced,” Erin points out.
“True,” she agrees. “Well I guess if he calls I’ll just suggest something over the weekend instead?”
“Susanna.” Caroline is shaking her head. “I don’t understand. You like this guy. You want to go out with him. It’s only one night. Just go!”
“No, I know what she’s saying,” Katie says. “It’s impossible. Since I’ve started this job, I’ve never been so exhausted.”
“You know what’s weird with Teach for America?” Caroline begins. “It almost seems like… you take these brilliant fresh teachers straight out of college and then they get their souls beaten down and destroyed for two or three years until they burn out, and then TFA just goes back and takes a new crop”.
“Well. That’s why it works.” Susanna bristles a bit. She feels strangely defensive over the program. After all she chose this path. And not just to get into graduate school. She genuinely believes in the mission of Teach for America and in the positive changes it creates in impoverished communities. She has seen an actual change in the minds and behavior of deeply emotionally disturbed children, as a direct consequence of her presence. And isn’t that far more important than being able to stay up until 4 a.m. drinking, or seeing a concert with a stranger who probably would never turn out to be a boyfriend any way? There must be some sort of karmic reward for sacrificing her youth in New York City to a life of responsibility and public service. Last night was wonderful and she’s often envious of Erin and Caroline and her friends that get to do it all the time, but now that she’s forced to consider it, would she truly want to change places?
It’s 7 a.m. on Monday morning and Susanna is still exhausted. One day wasn’t quite enough to recuperate. She looks around the classroom, which is a cheery place and exactly what you would expect in an elementary school. A chalkboard sits up front with a chart of the alphabet in upper and lowercase letters above it. There’s a small rug in the corner for reading and a bulletin board contains the reminders, “Are you sitting quietly?” and “Are you thinking while reading?” Various handmade poster boards around the room display the “Value of the Week,” a list of books the children have made it through that year, and different rules of the class. A line of windows lets in the morning light. It’s a large, colorful, happy room and she’s worked very hard to make it that way.
Susanna begins taking chairs down off the desks where the kids have to put them up at the end of each day. She’s wearing conservative black slacks, a cream colored cardigan, and flats. She normally wears her hair down but today it is pulled up in a ponytail and she chuckles as she imagines the kids’ reactions. They always notice when she does something different with her hair or clothes. This time they will rush in and each will have a comment for her. “Miss Preziosi, you look beautiful!” “Miss Preziosi, why did you put your hair like that today?” She never even wears heels any more so she doesn’t have to spend the day answering “Miss Preziosi, why are you big today?”
As she mentally begins running through the day’s lesson plan, trying to anticipate any potential problems that may arise she gets that old lady feeling again. Her thoughts drift to Hoodie and whether or not he’ll call. Somehow it seems like he couldn’t possibly-- because the Susanna that he met doesn’t even exist anymore. She feels ridiculous even thinking he would. Standing in the middle of her Bronx class room in a pair of practical shoes she thinks she was way too flirtatious and overly confident. And why had she drunk so much? She never drinks that much. Now he probably thinks she’s a lush.
She disappears into her small bedroom at the end of a short hallway in her tiny Hell’s Kitchen apartment. It’s 9 p.m. on Saturday night. It’s been a long week… very long, and she needs this night of total irresponsibility to shake it all off. It’s rare that she excited for a night out nowadays. She’s only 24 but most days she feels much, much older…. 40 or 50 or at least old enough to be worried about menopause and 401Ks rather than which bar to go to. But tonight that’s exactly what she’s concerned about. Well that and these pants, which look fantastic, but really might be too much. You have to be pretty confident to pull of skin tight bright red pants. Some liquid courage is definitely required.
She traipses back into the living room, which is really more of a living space/hallway/kitchen with a futon against one wall and a television an arm’s length away on the other wall. On either side of the TV are two narrow windows that look directly into the apartments across from them. The spectacles in the other apartments usually get more attention than the television. In one apartment a giant screen plays a constant loop of what appears to be gay porn, but from this angle (and with the giant close-ups of moving flesh) it’s difficult to tell. In another apartment, an overweight man in an ill-fitting pair of tighty whities paces back and forth furiously, pausing periodically to complete a labored set of calisthenics. In the dark his illuminated window highlights all the fine details of his zaftig form. It’s Susanna’s third year in this apartment now, having moved there directly after graduating at the top of her class from Middlebury College. While they once seemed strange and illicit to the girl who spent her first 18 years in a tiny town in New Jersey and the next four in a tiny town in Vermont, the bizarre window scenes barely register with her anymore, now serving mostly as an interesting conversation piece for visitors.
Her friend Erin, a television producer, sits on the futon sipping a Bloody Mary-esque mix of “Gordon’s” vodka and V8. It seems an odd and heavy choice for a pre-bar drink, but it’s all they had lying around. Susanna looks at it contemplatively for a moment and then gives a little shrug. “Erin, make me one of those?”
Erin begins mixing a drink for her, heavy on the vodka. She hands the drink over to Susanna and points to a tall stack of envelopes on the counter. “What are these?”
“Grad school.”
“Oh.”
Susanna doesn’t elaborate further. There are 14 applications total, all done and ready to be mailed. The hours of work it took to complete them are done, but it’s still a daunting pile. Of them, only three are addressed to New York zip codes; the rest are going all over the country.
Erin suddenly notices a drawing hanging up on the fridge and starts cracking up. “Oh my God, what is this??? What does that say? Massaging??” The drawing, done in crayons, shows three stick figures. The figure in the middle has a huge smile on his face and an arrow has been drawn designating “Me.” The two figures on the side have extraordinarily long, wavy arms that reach out to “Me” in the middle. Another arrow points to the arms and says “Masagin.”
Susanna sips her drink. “Carlos drew that. It was their assignment for Martin Luther King Day last year to illustrate their dream in life. His was two girls massaging him.” Erin is in hysterics. Susanna just smiles. Carlos is one of her students in the special education class at her school in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx, part of her other life, the one that makes her feel so old right now…the one she is escaping from tonight. She loves teaching—she’d been doing it for almost three years as part of the “Teach for America” program—but there’s one part of the job that’s more difficult than any other: getting away from it, and having the kind of fun a 24-year-old single woman in New York City deserves.
Arlene’s Grocery in the Lower East Side is packed wall to wall tonight. A long narrow bar greets the twentysomething patrons as they walk in. A small dance floor throbs with bodies grinding to a punched-up version of “99 Luftballons” by Nena.
Susanna loves this place. The energy in here is always off the charts, the hedonism almost palpable. She wastes no time sidling up to the bar, using an apologetic/flirtatious smile as a weapon to clear the way. Erin has gone off in search of their friends who are meeting them here, but Susanna is a woman on a mission tonight. She’s been single for awhile now and lately her life has been so burdened by work and exhaustion she hasn’t even had time for casual dates. She’s sick of feeling like a nun and the bar is absolutely laden with handsome potential.
She cozies up next to an attractive young man at the bar, decked out in the standard uniform of the LES indie-music-loving hipster: Grey hoodie, skinny black jeans and converse. He’s cute, she thinks. Just her type. She smiles up at him and he grins back.
“Hey!” He shouts over the music. “What are you drinking?”
“Vodka soda!”
“Hang on!” He leans over the bar. “Hey, can I get another Heineken and a vodka and soda!”
As they wait for their drinks, the only communication between them is a series of flirtatious smiles. Yes, she decides. He’s definitely, definitely cute. Well good, a drink and a guy. Two for one. That was easy.
At long last the bartender brings over the drinks. Hoodie pays and hands Susanna hers.
“What’s your name?!”
“Susanna!”
“Wait, come back here!”
Hoodie leads her to a calmer spot along the wall, looking out toward the dance floor. “So. Susanna huh? What brings you out here tonight?”
Small talk ensues. What is she doing there tonight? Meeting friends. Does he come here a lot? Yes he knows the bartender. Where does she live? Over in Hell’s Kitchen. She’d rather live down here or in Brooklyn, but it would have been an awful commute because she works up in the Bronx.
“The Bronx? What do you do?” He asks.
“I’m a teacher. What do you do?”
“Really? You don’t look like the teachers I had in school.”
“Yeah it’s… I don’t know. I do Teach for America. But what do you do?”
“I work for a video game company. So what grade do you teach?”
“They’re 6 and 7 years old but it’s special ed. What company do you work for?”
“No way, you teach special ed up in the Bronx? Man that must be a tough crowd.”
“They have their moments, but they’re really great kids. But anyway, it’s boring. Tell me about your job.”
“I’m sure it’s not boring.”
Hoodie is correct, she thinks. Her job is a lot of things and boring is not one of them. Stressful, exhausting, often unreal, and sometimes rewarding but not boring. When Alessandro had a rage attack and put his little fist through a thick glass window, it was not at all boring. When Marcos opted to find his own way home rather than take the school bus and she’d spent hours thinking he’d been kidnapped, that was not boring. And when Laquisha told her she was being molested by her stepfather, that was certainly not boring. Heartbreaking, scary, and panic-inducing moments all of them, but these were the things she had to think about constantly and she didn’t want these thoughts to find her here in this dark bar with this cute boy. The schoolteacher is staying home tonight. She is determined.
Bloc Party’s “Banquet” comes on and Susanna senses her out. “I love this song! Come dance with me.” Hoodie happily obliges.
The next six hours are spent in a blur of tequila shots, Irish car-bombs, and dancing the night away with her new Converse-clad beau. He lives in Brooklyn, likes the same music she does and has an interesting job. He seems almost too good to be true and she’s not quite sure if the booze acted as a social lubricant or as a blinding agent. Maybe there’s something gross about him that she’s missing, but right now she doesn’t care.
She doesn’t reconnect with Erin and the rest of her friends until almost 4 a.m., when the group stumbles out of the bar in search of pizza and French fries. The group begins to split according to neighborhood. Cabs are hailed. She’s been having an incredible time and isn’t ready for the night to end, because as soon as she gets in that cab it will no longer be Saturday night.
It will be Sunday, a day she dreads more than any other. The promise of a raging hangover and a stack of papers to grade looms in the distance.
On the plus side, she’s glad to still be hanging with her crowd. She feels like she’s an actual part of it this time, rather than hearing about it secondhand. Most of her friends are in comfortable media jobs or high-paying financial positions, and they do this at least two nights a week, but she hasn’t been out at this hour in months. There have been GREs to study for and grad school applications to do...parent-teacher conferences, papers to grade, lesson plans to make...not to mention her general state of exhaustion from waking up every morning at 5:20 a.m. and spending the day trying to corral and educate 12 young minds saddled with everything from A.D.H.D to autism, and everything in between. She knows this is not a life she is able to face with a hangover. The memory of her one attempt to do so, which resulted in expunging her guts of the previous night’s tequila shooters into a bag on the subway and falling asleep at her desk during her lunch break, serves as a constant reminder of that.
Erin has caught a cab back up to the West side so Susanna turns to Hoodie to say goodbye. He hesitates. “So…are you sure you don’t want to grab some food or have a nightcap somewhere or something?”
She does want to, actually. He is really cute, and it’s been such a fun and easy night...maybe she should just keep it going a little bit longer. Why not go have another drink, maybe make out a little? Other people do it all the time.
“I would like to but I’m just SO exhausted. I’d love to see that band you were talking about at Mercury Lounge next week though.” Since starting teaching, she gets intense cognitive dissonance about doing anything that’s even slightly against the rules. It’s a major pain in the ass.
He leans down and kisses her cheek. “Okay cool, they’re playing on Wednesday, so I’ll call you”.
She hasn’t been out on a Wednesday night since 2005, but she doesn’t tell him that.
“Sounds great,” she says.
Sunday brunch is something that Susanna both looks forward to and dreads every week. It’s almost as if the end of the meal signifies the end of any chance of free time for at least five incredibly long days. Some days she goes to brunch with her group of Teach for America friends and they compare notes on the inevitable chaos of their upcoming week. This is the only group that she really feels comfortable talking to about the details of her teaching day. They understand the complexities of her relationship with the kids and so she doesn’t worry so much that she’ll sound like she’s just “complaining about the little hoodlums up in the Bronx.”
Today however, she is meeting up with only one teaching friend, Katie, and they are joined by Erin and Erin’s roommate Caroline who writes for a magazine. They slide into a booth covered in an ugly floral print in a diner on West 52nd and Ninth. Susanna’s head is pounding and her stomach is churning but she can’t wait to fill her friends in on her evening.
“Sooooo?” Caroline eyes Susanna suggestively. “I heard you met a boyyyyyyy.”
Susanna grins. “Yeah, he was really cute. Nice. I gave him my number. Maybe he’ll call I don’t know. He was talking about seeing a show on Wednesday night but there’s no way I’m going to be able to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because this week is insane, and the show doesn’t even start until 11. I’ll never be able to get up and get everything done the next day.”
“I know, don’t you hate that?” Katie chimes in. “Seriously, it pisses my boyfriend off to no end that I won’t go anywhere on a week night. He just does not understand. He’ll be like, ‘I’ve been on a school schedule; I know what it’s like’. Um no honey, you really don’t. It’s so annoying.”
“Yeah well try telling that to a new guy,” Susanna shrugs. “I think he was really surprised that that’s even what I do.”
“Well you don’t exactly look like a schoolmarm do you? Your nose is pierced,” Erin points out.
“True,” she agrees. “Well I guess if he calls I’ll just suggest something over the weekend instead?”
“Susanna.” Caroline is shaking her head. “I don’t understand. You like this guy. You want to go out with him. It’s only one night. Just go!”
“No, I know what she’s saying,” Katie says. “It’s impossible. Since I’ve started this job, I’ve never been so exhausted.”
“You know what’s weird with Teach for America?” Caroline begins. “It almost seems like… you take these brilliant fresh teachers straight out of college and then they get their souls beaten down and destroyed for two or three years until they burn out, and then TFA just goes back and takes a new crop”.
“Well. That’s why it works.” Susanna bristles a bit. She feels strangely defensive over the program. After all she chose this path. And not just to get into graduate school. She genuinely believes in the mission of Teach for America and in the positive changes it creates in impoverished communities. She has seen an actual change in the minds and behavior of deeply emotionally disturbed children, as a direct consequence of her presence. And isn’t that far more important than being able to stay up until 4 a.m. drinking, or seeing a concert with a stranger who probably would never turn out to be a boyfriend any way? There must be some sort of karmic reward for sacrificing her youth in New York City to a life of responsibility and public service. Last night was wonderful and she’s often envious of Erin and Caroline and her friends that get to do it all the time, but now that she’s forced to consider it, would she truly want to change places?
It’s 7 a.m. on Monday morning and Susanna is still exhausted. One day wasn’t quite enough to recuperate. She looks around the classroom, which is a cheery place and exactly what you would expect in an elementary school. A chalkboard sits up front with a chart of the alphabet in upper and lowercase letters above it. There’s a small rug in the corner for reading and a bulletin board contains the reminders, “Are you sitting quietly?” and “Are you thinking while reading?” Various handmade poster boards around the room display the “Value of the Week,” a list of books the children have made it through that year, and different rules of the class. A line of windows lets in the morning light. It’s a large, colorful, happy room and she’s worked very hard to make it that way.
Susanna begins taking chairs down off the desks where the kids have to put them up at the end of each day. She’s wearing conservative black slacks, a cream colored cardigan, and flats. She normally wears her hair down but today it is pulled up in a ponytail and she chuckles as she imagines the kids’ reactions. They always notice when she does something different with her hair or clothes. This time they will rush in and each will have a comment for her. “Miss Preziosi, you look beautiful!” “Miss Preziosi, why did you put your hair like that today?” She never even wears heels any more so she doesn’t have to spend the day answering “Miss Preziosi, why are you big today?”
As she mentally begins running through the day’s lesson plan, trying to anticipate any potential problems that may arise she gets that old lady feeling again. Her thoughts drift to Hoodie and whether or not he’ll call. Somehow it seems like he couldn’t possibly-- because the Susanna that he met doesn’t even exist anymore. She feels ridiculous even thinking he would. Standing in the middle of her Bronx class room in a pair of practical shoes she thinks she was way too flirtatious and overly confident. And why had she drunk so much? She never drinks that much. Now he probably thinks she’s a lush.
